XFX dares to go where the competition would like to, but can't. That's because, at XFX, we don't just create great digital video components—we build all-out, mind-blowing, performance-crushing, competition-obliterating video cards and motherboards. And, not only are they amazing, you don't have to live on dry noodles and peanut butter to afford them.

XFX is a division of PINE Technology Holdings Limited, a leading manufacturer and marketer of innovative solutions for the worldwide gaming technologies market. Founded in 1989, PINE designs, develops, manufactures and distributes high-performance video graphics technology and computer peripherals. The company's dedicated research and development team are continually pushing the limits to meet the demands of the ever-growing and performance-driven community. Headquartered in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Hong Kong SAR), PINE has more than 1,000 employees worldwide with 16 offices around the globe. PINE also maintains four state-of-the-art research and development facilities in the Asia Pacific region and two factories in Mainland China. To learn more about PINE, please visit www.pinegroup.com .

XFX HD 4770 VIDEO CARD INTRODUCTION

With times getting tight and the economy shrinking, the computer tweaking community is again in full swing trying to find out how to save money, but still have a good overall computing and gaming experience. Money is tight, yet people still want to freshen up their rig to make it as up to date as their budget will allow.

With its new 40nm manufacturing process in the RV740 core and a 750Mhz ( 1960 GFLOP ) core speed coupled with DDR5 memory with a bandwidth of 51.2 GB/s, this "lowest" option in ATI's performance hand might not be the "slowest" card they have out at this moment. And with the smaller manufacturing process, this card will be cooler and use less power to perform the same video rendering as the older version still up for sale now.

But the availability of the HD 4770 based videocards had led to rumors of lower RV740 stock leading to lower manufactured numbers of these cards. But if you can get one of them, some testing is showing that they can be a potent crossfire punch that for the money and the cost per performance is unrivaled in the market today. But that will be for another review in the near future.

ATI CrossFireX™ Technology - ATI CrossFireX™ technology with dual GPU support offers superior scalability so your system is ready to level up when you are 2 .

PCI Express 2.0 - Support for PCI Express 2.0 will prepare you for bandwidth-hungry games and 3D applications.

Power to Spare - This GPU has the brute processing power needed for physics, artificial intelligence, stream computing and ray tracing calculations.

Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD 2) - UVD 2 frees up your CPU for other tasks so you get The Ultimate Visual Experience™ for even the most processing-intensive content, including VC-1, H.264 and now MPEG-2. Also, take full advantage of Blu-ray functionality with dual-stream, picture in picture (PIP) capabilities 1,3 .

Accelerated Video Transcoding (AVT) - With ATI Stream technology, owners of ATI Radeon™ HD 4770 GPUs can help accelerate the conversion of standard and HD video into multiple formats for use on differing consumer electronics devices. The ATI Video Converter, designed to enable GPU transcoding of HD video streams, is currently available.